Can acupuncture help relieve seasonal allergies?

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Feb 19 (Reuters) - Watery eyes and stuffy noses are seasonal
martyrdom for millions of allergy sufferers around the globe,
but now a German study finds that some help may come from an
unlikely source - acupuncture.

Researchers, publishing in the Annals of Internal Medicine,
found that 71 percent of people reported an improvement in their
allergies after eight weeks of acupuncture.

But so did 56 percent of allergy sufferers who were treated
with sham acupuncture as a comparison.

"Acupuncture led to statistically significant improvements
in disease-specific quality of life an antihistamine use
measures after eight weeks of treatment compared with sham
acupuncture and with (medication) along," wrote lead researcher
Benno Brinkhaus and colleagues. "But the improvements may not be
clinically significant."

Brinkhaus, at Charite-University Medical Center in Berlin,
and his colleagues randomly assigned 422 people with seasonal
allergies to receive real or sham acupuncture or to take only
antihistamines as needed.

After eight weeks and 12 treatment sessions, average allergy
symptom scores dropped among people in the acupuncture group
from 2.7 to 1.7 points on a 0-to-6 scale, where lower scores
indicate fewer symptoms.

Among patients treated with sham acupuncture, symptom scores
improved from 2.3 to 1.8 point, and from 2.5 to 2.2 in the
medication only group.

However, by another eight weeks after the treatment ended,
there was no longer any difference in the degree of symptom
improvement between groups.

People with allergies would likely notice about a half-point
change on the symptom scale in their daily lives, the
researchers said - the difference between the real and sham
acupuncture groups after eight weeks in the current study.

"It works, but there are some caveats (for) people who might
think of using it," said Harold Nelson, who treats allergies at
National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado and was not part of
the study.

"This is pretty invasive, particularly when you compare it
to something like spraying a nasal steroid in your nose once a
morning," he added. It is also more time consuming and requires
finding a qualified, licensed acupuncture's.

Researchers aren't sure why acupuncture might help people
with seasonal allergies, other than its possible beneficial
effect on the immune system.

Nelson said antihistamines might not have been the best drug
comparison for acupuncture, since daily use of nasal steroids is
better at preventing symptoms.

But drugs don't work well for everybody.

"We mostly saw patients in our outpatient practice who have
had this disease for years," Brinkhaus told Reuters Health.
"They are not very happy taking the medications every day, and
some of them suffer from side effects."

For those people, acupuncture could be a good add-on option,
he added.

"It's not an alternative. We use it firstly as some sort of
complementary medicine," he said. "If the acupuncture has good
results, we can reduce the anti-allergic medication."
SOURCE: bit.ly/MnBiCA

(Reporting from New York by Genevra Pittman at Reuters Health;
editing by Elaine Lies)